The SC ruling on VP Sara’s impeachment and the Leonen I know
The Dutertes have legions of pitchers and batters across various government institutions, especially in the Senate. At the Supreme Court, all 11 Duterte-appointed justices and two others voted unanimously to void Vice President Sara Duterte’s impeachment. Surprisingly, Justice Marvic Leonen, an appointee of the late President Benigno Aquino III and the court’s “great dissenter,” authored the ponencia. Some say that Leonen’s own impeachment scare in 2021 nudged him to curb Congress’ power. Others say he’d be made chief justice under a Sara Duterte presidency.
I say, there’s a way to oppose the ruling other than formal dissent. Leonen’s concurrence and crafty authorship of the ponencia may have vitiated the Duterte impeachment ruling more than his lone dissension ever could. The ponencia slyly echoed Duterte’s narratives, implicitly casting the VP not as a legitimate suspect facing plunder and sedition charges, but as a politically persecuted dissenter. It framed her impeachment as a distraction from the “real problems of corruption, inequality, poverty.” Above all, it made past, present, and future impeachment attempts next to impossible. Leonen’s ponencia heartily sang to the gallery of Duterte appointees, securing their signatures.
A study on the Philippine Supreme Court under former president Rodrigo Duterte, published on Nov. 10, 2020, by Social Science Research Council, found that “all of President Duterte’s appointees have consistently and reliably voted in his favor.” Another study, published on Apr. 18, 2023, by Cambridge University Press, also found that “Under the Duterte administration, voting preferences have been more aligned with the appointer.”
The ruling satiated Duterte partisans and let the VP hastily escape and soar, like Icarus, on wings made of broken jurisprudence, judicial overreach, absurd impositions, and factual errors that constitute grave abuse of discretion by the Supreme Court itself. The Dutertes seem oblivious to the wax-winged ruling that will inevitably melt under the light and heat of appellate scrutiny, making it eminently reversible. I think Leonen was addressing his SC colleagues when he wrote: “This Court, regardless of the political result, will not evade its duty to declare when an act is done with grave abuse of discretion amounting to an excess of jurisdiction of any department, organ, or … [this Court itself.]” This is the Leonen I see.
Justices must have an innate abhorrence for untouchable miscreants. I can’t help picturing the VP’s assistants laughing as they coined funnel names like Chippy Mcdonald, Fernando Tempura, and Mary Grace Piattos. It’s abhorrent even for Duterte-appointed justices. Given the violence and corruption, and the moral and institutional destruction the Dutertes have perpetrated and are still capable of, their pitchers and batters will be called upon again and again.
The Dutertes are only as powerful as you make them. You know well the right time to do the right thing in the right way—and by the right people. Justices of the Supreme Court, may you be remembered not as sordid specimens of subservience but as esteemed umpires of law and justice whose decisions, regardless of the political result, we will respect.
Ernie Lapuz,
nitelites@rocketmail.com
